growing up in a good ol' Kiwi Campground

It’s on Facebook

When we first thought about moving to Brunei, I wanted information. And lots of it. And being me, I first turned to my good friend Google. I couldn’t even tell you how long I spent searching for ‘expat life kuala belait’, ‘what to do in kuala belait’ ‘expat brunei blog’, and various other combinations of the words expat, kuala belait, brunei, information, blog, along with specifics like restaurants, spa, tailors, supermarket. I didn’t expect to truly understand what it might be like, but I wanted to know a little bit to prepare me.

And when many of these searches resulted in nothing, or very little, or old websites in Comic Sans with horribly out of date information and clip art, I figured “Oh well, they’re just not that into the internet, that’s cool” and decided to just wait and see when we got here. And that did work. People were helpful, and we managed to find out most things by asking. But I was still doing my best google research to try and find some things out (and I’m pretty nifty with a search engine, if I do say so myself), and still getting pretty frustrated. But then I discovered an important piece of information:

Brunei is not big on websites, but they are big on Facebook.

Want to find out what time a movie’s on? Like them on Facebook. Want to know about specials on mobile phones? Find them on Facebook. Want to find out what’s happening at the Panaga Club? Head to Facebook (they’ve actually got a pretty good newsletter too…)

So yesterday, when The Engineer told me that he was having trouble finding up to date information on the Boat Club (we want to hire a powerboat for a river trip) I told him I’d try and find something this morning. I had some printed information from when we first signed up, and didn’t want him to get too distracted from his work. I read, and I searched. And then I stumbled on the goldmine, and sent a link through to him.